Hello, boys

IT HAS taken half a century, but the international movie world has progressed from rendering gay people invisible to embracing arguably a post-gay world of centre-frame queer characters whose sexuality is often a side concern.

Now the evolution broadens its reach: a week of same-sex-themed feature films from the US, Canada, Italy and Britain as well as Lebanon (standing in for Iran) on national television, the World Movies channel, before Sydney's Mardi Gras parade on March 2.

As far back as 1978, the year of the first Mardi Gras - when revellers were arrested and homosexual acts still illegal across most of Australia - there was a gay and lesbian film festival in Sydney, so it might be said TV has come a little late to the party. World Movies has signed an official partnership deal with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

But studio-driven Hollywood itself moves at a glacial pace, despite the town's liberalism.

Nikohl Boosheri (left) as Atafeh and Sarah Kazemy as Shireen in Circumstance. _DSC0086_1.jpg

Gay characters' early depiction was straight from the script of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In Rope, in 1948, for instance, Alfred Hitchcock had two brilliant young ''aesthetes'' - code for homosexuals - commit murder capriciously and stuff the body in a trunk, then carry on being debonair.

In The Children's Hour (1961), an accused lesbian played by Shirley MacLaine hanged herself in the final reel.

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Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain was a hit in 2005 - an entire film that dealt tenderly with a cowboy-on-cowboy romance, even if Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist met a grisly end. The fact mainstream audiences could now see gay stories in cinemas, however, made Jodie Foster's 2013 Golden Globes ''coming out'' speech past her cinema prime at age 50 almost beside the point.

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World Movies general manager Chris Keely sees Mala Noche, the 1985 black-and-white feature debut of American director Gus Van Sant, as a watershed that helped ''create the genre of queer cinema''. The film features on February 27 as part of the station's week of six ''queer'' films.

''He was depicting the love affair between two guys, and it wasn't stigmatising gayness by showing a gay story,'' Keely says.

This writer, however, found Mala Noche the weakest of the six Mardi Gras-week films, given its Jean-Luc Godard-style affectations. It's probably best seen as a formative work of the director who went on to make queer classics My Own Private Idaho, starring River Phoenix, and Milk, starring Sean Penn as real-life assassinated gay activist Harvey Milk. The movie is a central element in the best of the six films, Circumstance, by director Maryam Keshavarz (see story, below), which begins the series on Monday, February 25.

In the latter film, set in Iran but made in Lebanon, young characters struggling to articulate human rights - including two teenage girls experimenting with their same-sex attraction - have the job of dubbing Milk into the Farsi language. ''What they were doing to the gays 30 years ago, they're doing to you now,'' a young Iranian man tells them.

Keely's pick of the bunch, however, is the 2011 British film Weekend, in which two unlikely gay characters form a fleeting relationship, despite mismatched levels of commitment.

He was depicting the love affair between two guys, and it wasn't stigmatising gayness by showing a gay story

''It shows, in a modern urban environment, a different aspect of gay experience, where the issue is not about dealing with the sexuality principally, but the struggles of connecting with people,'' he says.

Much deserved praise has already been heaped on Colin Firth's performance as a grieving gay man in Tom Ford's adaptation of A Single Man, to be shown on February 28, but that is followed on March 1 by the remarkable Canadian film I Killed My Mother - written, directed and starring Xavier Dolan battling issues with his divorced mother and where sexuality, again, is a given and not the central point.

The final film, Loose Cannons, from Italy, is the light-hearted tale of two gay brothers' thwarted coming out.

The week should leave the audience wanting more - and Keely promises next year the series will be longer, possibly including stories with transgender characters.

CHANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Atafeh and Shireen are curious about one another. The Iranian teenage girls enjoy going to "sewing class", a euphemistic ruse for the underground party scene, where alcohol and sexual experimentation are on offer.

But society watches them, and a potential raid by the morality police is never far away. Despite the strong criticism of Islamic fundamentalism implicit in her film Circumstance, which follows the two aforementioned girls, director Maryam Keshavarz, who was born in New York and spent summers growing up in Iran, still considers herself a Muslim.

"Much to the dismay of many of those around me, I identify as Muslim, even though I have brothers who are staunchly intellectual atheists," says Keshavarz, 37.

"My grandfather was a religious poet; he was very spiritual. I don't think it means disenfranchisement of women and all those terrible things that have been associated with it - I think that's how it can be perverted. Like any religion, there's purity to it if you practice it in a very personal way."

Nonetheless, given the subject matter, the film was made in Lebanon, standing in for Iran.

"After the film premiered at Sundance there was a scathing article about me in one of the national [Iran] newspapers, and some friends of mine in the government there said it was probably a good idea I didn't go back," Keshavarz says.

Do definitions such as gay and lesbian widely exist in Iran? How would the fictional Atafeh and Shireen see themselves?

"In Iran it's ... brave that they're following their desires and pushing their boundaries," Keshavarz says. "What I wanted to get across is that they truly love each other.

"There are [gay and lesbian] movements, but they're highly secret. It's a difficult question because some people say to have a gay identity you have to be out, and that's not possible in Iran. Can you identify with that when just speaking those words can you get killed? It's a complicated question."